


Vanishing Point

by Petronia



Series: Hannibal stories [10]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Christmas, Cuba, Implied Cannibalism, M/M, Memory Palace, Minor Original Character(s), Oral Fixation, POV Alternating, POV Second Person, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-09-11 18:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9002056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia
Summary: Will and Hannibal in Cuba.





	1. Bedroom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coloredink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/gifts).



Will sleeps.

It's the secret hour. You learned to enjoy other lovers like this, once, years ago: an excess of pleasure – a  _ trifle _ in the wine – then sleep. Then beauty, all the more beauteous for becoming object, living and warm and silent in your bed. 

Not to touch, of course. Only to look at. A pose, once or twice, that you found admirable, and reproduced from memory later, in colder flesh. There was much to do at night, and you never stayed at their side for long.

Will is different. 

His sleep is restless, but not light. He shifts and mutters and sometimes turns into you, sometimes away. His head migrates off the pillows and onto your arm. He sweats and makes the sheets damp when he sleeps naked, even on the sheerest linen, with the air conditioning turned up. He refuses to sleep naked, except by accident. 

His eyes flicker under closed lids. Sometimes his lashes are damp too. The scent of him permeates the room like incense. Sometimes he smells like desire, and you want to wake him: you want to ask if it's for you, if he's finally hunted you down, in the dark forest that crowds his dreams. But you prefer to let him rest.

You'll wake him after dawn, you decide. 

You'll ask him to play a game.


	2. Atrium

In the Norman Chapel, dim and gold with candlelight, Hannibal lights a taper.

The wick catches with a hiss. As the flame stabilizes, a camphorous, vegetal scent fills the air, not at all like that of incense or wax. You raise your head.

(In some version of physical reality, you are ensconced in a plush armchair in the high-ceilinged breakfast room, its slatted shades closed against the sun. Hannibal has bound your eyes with a length of something silken and opaque – to eliminate distractions, he said. It doesn't stop you from _seeing._ )

"Not all doorways are carved in marble or wood," Hannibal says. "Many senses lead us to memory. What do yours perceive, Will?"

"The forest," you say.

It breaks, noiselessly, through the floor: black branches pushing between and around the tile. The chapel retreats. A movement of air sends glittering snow swirling around your ankles. The flame wavers, and Hannibal shields it with his bare hand.

He watches you with approval.

Something shifts, out there, between the trees.


	3. House

There is a breakfast room. There is a dining room and a music room, and a parlour, and a back parlour, and an interior courtyard with a bubbling fountain and wicker benches shaded by potted palms. There is a front hall, which is paved in pink and black marble. There is a library. There is a raised patio with a swimming pool. There are spacious bathrooms. There are bedrooms, all with screen doors leading onto the same long balcony, from which there is a view of the sea.

There is, of course, a kitchen.

The house is too large, even with the dogs. It's clean but the paint is old. There isn't enough furniture to fill the space, and the shelves are mostly bare. You find that obscurely comforting. You used to spend all your time on the beach, with the dogs, but now that the heat is merciless you work inside during the day, on window fixtures and baseboard trim. 

For some reason Hannibal tolerates your situation. He buys things, from time to time – paintings or rugs or books – but he makes no concerted attempt to decorate. You have the sense, looking at him, that some part has been stripped away. Like scales, or wings. You think you were the one who did it.

Not that he's diminished. Only that the thing between and  _ in _ you both is growing, and so requires its space. It's grown for a long time. You don't feel empty.


	4. Rita

Rita has filled out since she started working for you. She stands straighter. The first time you saw her there was a bruise on her cheekbone, bruises on her arm. Then her father disappeared and the bruises did too. She's efficient and capable and does all the floors and bathrooms in two hours, top to bottom, excluding locked doors. Afterward the house smells of floral vinegar and is nearly free of dog hair.

For Christmas, Rita visits relatives in Santiago de Cuba. You give her the week off with pay, and several brown wax paper packets. "For your family, with my regards for the holiday season," you tell her. "Applewood smoked pork belly roll, with honey glaze and prune compote stuffing. And for you, Rita, a dozen of the miniature  _ pains au chocolat _ with almonds."

She very much liked them, before, when you had a basket left over from breakfast. "Thank you, Doctor Leibniz," she says. "Thank you."

"I know you've had a difficult year, Rita," you say. "If you find you need help, don't hesitate to come to me. You have only to ask."

You go looking for Will once she leaves. He takes the dogs down to the beach when Rita comes; in order not to ruin her hard work, he says. They used to greet each other, cheerfully on Rita's side at least, but Will has avoided her entirely since her father's boat was found adrift in the harbour. He did not like the idea of the smoked pork belly, no matter how evident it was that the freezer needed clearing out.

Will should see how much better Rita looks in person, you decide. Perhaps, in January, you'll have her come by on a different morning. Just the once.


	5. Shelter

When you first arrived you built a shelter, on the beach, out of driftwood and old planks from the house's refurbishment. That gave you something to do. The air was blood-warm, and you took to sleeping out there, most nights, on an inflatable mattress covered with a striped cotton fouta you found on the yacht. After you took in the puppies, but before they were house trained, they stayed with you. 

Hannibal came to you, a few times. Once he built a campfire and set a tripod over it and made a shrimp dish that was not unlike the crawfish boils you remember from New Orleans. Another time it was paella. He brought white wine down from the house, chilled in a bucket of ice, and explained that it was Hungarian.

"The Tokaji appellation experienced a lack of botrytis in 2015," he said. "In better years the furmint grape would have gone toward a 5-puttonyo rather than a dry white, no matter how elegantly executed. I suppose we have global warming to thank."

You kissed him to shut him up. He tasted like the wine, of gardenias and honey, and a little of seafood and saffron. Afterward he let you strip him out of his crisp linen trousers and crisp cotton shirt and take him, naked, on the air mattress in your little driftwood hut, on your beach where there are no people and no lights but the infinite weight of stars pressing you into the sand.

It's not an imposition, when he comes to you. He belongs to you. He's patient but sometimes he needs to know that you know it, too.


	6. Insect Activity

"It wasn't even a case at first," Will says. He is lying on the grassy bank of his river, eyes closed. His head is in your lap. "Just a body – the Durocher girl. Some kids found her and called it in. She was in the woods behind her own house, not a hundred yards away. The rope had severed her neck post-mortem, and a coyote had dragged the skull away. The rest of her was under the tree. The noose was still hanging from the branch.

"There were no fractures, no weapon trauma. She had a psychiatric history. They figured it was suicide."

"You disagreed," you say. 

"I wasn't Homicide then. I couldn't explain it to them at first."

You run your fingers through his curls, feeling their silken weight. There's something to be said for this position, versus the one you conventionally take with each other, in facing chairs. 

"But you insisted, eventually. What did you say?"

"That the maggots had gone for her hands first." Will's eyelids twitch, then still. "They crawl away to pupate, but you could tell they radiated out from where her hands had been. That meant there had been blood."

"Defensive wounds," you say. "Inflicted or received."

"I told them I'd been fishing with blowfly gentles and casters since I was eight. I know how they behave in every climate – up north, out west, you name it. Years afterward I wrote that monograph." Will sighed, a soft exhale. "It got taken up. I guess it was more straightforward than the standard textbook."

"You wrote it to be of use in the field," you say. "to show that your process is evidence-based."

"It is evidence-based," Will says.

Evidence was not what he saw first, when he looked at the dead girl with a psychiatric history. You think of a headless saint – a stigmatic martyress, rays emanating from weeping wounds in her hands. You caress his hair, saying nothing, and watch the light play over the river's surface, in his mind.


	7. Stranger

You see him coming, on the shore path, as you’re walking to the bait and tackle shop the next morning. A distant black dot, at first.

You have plenty of time to observe as he approaches. He has time to look at you, too, though your scars aren’t easy to distinguish from afar. You try not to tense. If he recognizes you from up close you’ll deal with it.

Late thirties, maybe forties. Six foot tall, pudgy clean-shaven face. A Toronto Blue Jays cap that hides all hair or lack thereof. Dressed like a tourist, overall, in bermuda shorts and polo shirt.

Tourists don’t tend to come out here.

He doesn’t recognize you. As you pass, shoulder to shoulder on the path, he tilts his head and touches the brim of his cap. It’s an incongruous gesture, as if the man were used to more old-fashioned headgear. You force yourself to smile and meet his eyes.

They’re pale blue, and empty, as if his mind is on something else entirely.

You’re close to the docks before you understand, consciously, what you perceived: the sun is brutal, even well before noon, and the man was headed uphill. You’re half drenched, but there was no sweat on his face. No flush, no dampness around his collar or under his arms. As if weather or exertion could not touch him.

You look back along the path and see nothing. Not even a black dot.


	8. Inside

Will is on edge. He stays close to the house and makes rounds, checking windows and doors and the edges of the grounds. He opens each set of slatted shades in turn and looks for lines of sight.

"It would be difficult to import a sniper rifle to Cuba," you tell him. In any case, there are few buildings within the requisite distance, and very many palm trees.

Will sighs. "I saw someone on the path today," he says. "Maybe it's nothing."

The dogs have caught his mood: they slink around your knees and rarely stray out of the kitchen. They've grown large but remain intimidatingly, unadoptably ugly. There is some mastiff in them. Will raised them by hand, and you've never seen them behave aggressively.

They've never seen anyone attack Will, or you.

You're warm, with anticipation and something else. You remember standing among the black trees, with Randall Tier, watching Will's home from a distance. How still and bright and small it looked, like the miniature inside a glass snow globe. You saw Randall take off toward the tree line, a dark beast churning snow in its wake, and Will run out of the house with a rifle in hand. Every detail was visible, but no sound carried to you, even when the glass broke.

There was broken glass, too, at the house on the cliff. That wasn't a home. It was a trap, made to evoke reality, and you were bait caught under the lit-up bell.

Will wasn't supposed to defend you. But he did, and now you're inside with him.

Now you're his.

You rinse flour and powdered sugar off your hands and dry them on your apron. You want to put him on your counter, but they're covered with trays of unbaked cookies. Instead you take him by the waist and steer him away from the back patio door, to the wicker armchair in the corner. It's the safest position in the house: in shadow, but with a clear view of the courtyard entrance and the stairway up to the second floor. 

"You should keep an eye on the oven," Will murmurs. But his breath hitches when you kneel, and he doesn't stop you, only parts his knees to draw you closer. 

In this weather he wears shorts and a sleeveless tank and not much else. You run your palms up his mostly-bare thighs, and ruck up the edge of his shirt so you can see the scar you gave him.

"You worry too much, Will," you say. Then you don't say anything else, because you're too preoccupied with getting his fly open and taking him into your mouth. The scent and heat and  _ bulk _ of him weighing on your tongue. 

You suck him until he's hard, until his exhalation shudders and he puts his hands in your hair and starts to use you. He invades your throat, opens you wide. You like it. You don't need food, or air. He's tense, wound up tight, under and around and inside you. You want him to feel good about what he's doing; so good he can't help but let go. You want him to fill you up.

By the time he spills in your mouth you're not really thinking. Will believes you do, all the time, but sometimes you only feel. You're lightheaded with lust and lack of oxygen and you swallow and swallow and taste him all the way down and you're pleased with yourself. 

Then Will tugs at you until you're in the chair with him. The wicker creaks under your combined weight. He moves your apron out of the way and puts his hand down the front of your trousers and works your cock, his grip tight and confident: _this is mine too._ You squeeze your eyes shut and bury your nose against the curve of his throat and hold onto his shoulder, hard enough to bruise. 

You make a mess of yourself, in the end. The cookies are only slightly burnt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always loved the book canon of Will being stuck with puppies that are so ugly no one is sure if they are dogs (probably dogs). I bet they're sweethearts. :(


	9. Red (I)

The cookies are baked, and cooled. Hannibal decorates them with glaze and sugar pearls, tucks them in parchment paper, and packages them six to a craft paper gift box, to which he affixes a gold foil seal and a bow made of red velvet ribbon. The stack of finished boxes grows, its edges exactly parallel with the kitchen counter's.

You have no idea where the gift wrap came from. You suspect the recipients will repurpose all of it, down to the baking parchment. Your father, lacking a daughter, would nevertheless have kept the ribbon for fly-making, or for patching a hem. You imagine going to school, red velvet flashing at the frayed cuff of your jeans leg. 

It would have ended in a fight. Someone else would have picked one: any excuse was good where the new boy was concerned.

Hannibal is neat now, as if you never touched him. Not a hair out of place.  _ Sleek and meek and well-fed,  _ you think. As a boy he would have fought as you did, to instill fear and build a reputation as bulwark. Full-grown he's a wily, vicious predator, well able to take care of himself.

You don't want to let him outside.

"I'm coming with you," you say instead.

Hannibal makes no rejoinder, nor does he when you whistle the dogs into the back of your truck. You don't want to leave them behind in the house either: you remember Dolarhyde too well. 

It makes for a picture. The kindly, retired European doctor, his boat mechanic friend, six overgrown mutts, and an antiquated truck that was on cinderblocks when Hannibal bought it off a local. You sank two months of tinkering into it and it runs acceptably now, in first gear. Children chase you down the street outright.

Of course, they know you. Hannibal's set a broken finger here, given an under-the-table cortisone injection there. In a little while more he'll be a pillar of the community. As it is, no one's surprised that he's brought Christmas baking for Juan at the tackle shop, or Clara at the police station; only delighted. You're asked in for dinner everywhere you park the truck.

You're the afterthought to the invitation – the odd, quiet one. You never went into town at first, so when you did there were stares. But you took the boat out to search with Juan, when Rita's father disappeared, and since then the neighbours have stopped looking at you askance. 

You don't like thinking about that.


	10. Sunset

You end the day at the tackle shop, banished to the pier's end with Juan and his lobster traps, while Hannibal chats with the women.

"There are tourists staying overnight at Dolores'," he tells you, over fingers of rum. "Four, five, from Cayo Levisa. They brought their own boat."

You feel a sudden, sharp relief. On some level, you realize, you expected to find out you hallucinated the stranger. "They came to fish?"

Juan shrugs. You both know the diving is better in the  _ cayos. _

On the drive back you compare notes with Hannibal; his gossip is more precise. "Canadian," he says. "A retired couple, son, and friend of the family. The latter is French."

"Is there a fifth?"

"A guide employed by the resort." Hannibal glances at you, sidewise. "We've been invited to drinks at La Mariposa, tonight. Presumably the tourists will be there."

You grimace. "Right."

"I made our excuses. But the door is open, as it were."

The sun is setting, behind you. The light casts long blue and roseate shadows that run ahead of your truck, striping the weathered pale asphalt. Everything has a golden cast, as if the air itself has liquefied to honey: Hannibal's hair, the exposed skin of his throat and wrists. The long ribbon of reflective sea in the distance, behind him, when you turn to look.

You take off your shades so as to see him better.

"Do you want to go?" you say.

Hannibal doesn't answer for a moment. Instead he reaches over, eyes still on the road, and places his hand over yours. There's a soft cast to his mouth.

"No," he says. "You should, Will. Make sure it's safe."


	11. Outside

You follow him, of course. Will expects it of you–

You think. Anyway.

There's a good uphill vantage point on the shore path, from which the docks and brightly lit front yard of La Mariposa are easily observed, through binoculars. You recline in the friendly darkness, under a stand of palmetto, and watch Juan lock up; watch Will pull alongside in the truck and greet him. Will parks, and the two of them disappear into the bar.

Dolores and her cousin Julio arrive, with the tourists in tow. You mark their faces, so as to recognize them later. The mother, the father – and that must be the son, with the same square build. The Frenchman, hawk-nosed and balding. And the other.

Which one did Will see?

_What_ did Will see?

Will might know more, after tonight. He'll tell you once he's home. Or, he'll say nothing. _Maybe it's nothing._

You give it – them – a minute, then you start down the path.

The new boat isn't hard to identify. It's not a fishing vessel converted for diving, but a small, modern yacht, not unlike your own. The hatch is locked, but the layout is comprehensible from the outside: main cabin, two berths, shower and kitchenette. Storage bins on deck for fishing gear, freezer for the catch. And a smell, ever so faint and sweet, of death.

You smile and close your eyes, just for a moment.

It's one of the bins. Locked, too, but no matter. The contents are long gone, the inside rinsed – scrubbed – seawater and the tarry, childhood scent of carbolic soap. This one is careful, wary and attentive to detail. But you have been the FBI's bedevilment: the world’s foremost expert on erasure of evidence.

And to hide, one must first find...

You search for a few minutes before you spot it. There, caught under the bin's edge, glossy-black in the sodium yellow of the guide lights: an empty casing. The fly long hatched and gone.


End file.
